Industry Standards for Special Characters
In XML, some special characters are reserved for internal use, and to use these characters in data, you must replace them with entity or numeric references. This table shows the special characters that are reserved for XML along with the entity and numeric references that enable you to use a special character in your XML documents:
Character Name |
Character |
Entity Reference |
Numeric Reference |
|---|---|---|---|
Ampersand |
& |
& |
& |
Left angle bracket (less than) |
< |
< |
< |
Right angle bracket (greater than) |
> |
> |
> |
Straight quotation mark |
" |
" |
" |
Apostrophe |
' |
' |
' |
Percent |
% |
Not Applicable |
% |
Another way to use special characters in your XML documents is to use the CDATA section. Any text inside a CDATA section is ignored by the parser.